Brighter Flames Arrayed

I’m cleaning out my pile of old documents and I found… a stack of transparencies with problems written on them. Back in the old days I used to write problems that were long on transparencies and project them on a side screen while we worked on them on the board.

That was… 2006. Or maybe 2007? It wasn’t actually until 2008 that I had an LCD projector in every room I taught in. It’s kind of crazy that I’ve only actually been (able to be) using tablet PCs for two years and it feels like forever since I picked up a transparency marker.

There is actually a stack of transparencies sitting in the department office supply closet and several transparency pens and I have no idea what to do with them. Don’t say “make ’stained glass’ art”, though, because we have a real stained glass studio like 200 ft away from that same closet.

Wing :: Jun.18.2010 :: Posts :: No Comments »

I live about five miles away from a Local Farm. It is literally halfway between me and the large Fancy Supermarket and a third of the way between me and the large Generic Grocery-co.

It costs more for me to buy in-season vegetable grown at Local Farm at Local Farm itself sold by its own workers than to buy the same in-season vegetable grown halfway across the state at Fancy Supermarket. In turn, it costs even less for me to buy the same thing grown halfway across the country at Generic Grocery-co. This includes the amount of extra gas I would need to use to get to the large markets.

The same thing applies to out of season vegetables. The Local Co-op stocks, say, lettuce from greenhouses an hour or so away during the winter. But that is much more expensive than lettuce grown in California and shipped across the entire continent to Generic Grocery-co.

Now, of course, I haven’t been to Generic Grocery-co in years. I do 98% of my shopping at the Local Farm, the Local Co-op and the Co-op That Is Slightly Further Away (but still not as far away as Generic Grocery-co). But even though I live in rural Vermont and am literally surrounded by farms I am still paying significantly more for the food grown down the road than food grown in California; that’s a little silly. Considering that I’m really living in one of the best possible places to eat local and this is a best case scenario, that’s a little sad. And the price margin—especially on meat—is significant enough that if I wasn’t living alone and had to shop for a family of 4.2 or whatever the average is while paying a mortgage I wouldn’t be able to do this on a teacher’s salary.

What’s even sadder and more baffling is that Generic Grocery-co has a ton of business because it’s situated nicely next to the Industrial Area and the Sub-par Housing and the Poor People. So basically we’ve got a bunch of people who literally cannot afford to buy food grown ten miles away and so they have to import cheaper food grown across the country. They have to call up some dude in a suit in the Midwest and ask him to torture some cows and feed them hormones because they can’t afford to buy the happy healthy cow standing right next to them.

That’s more than a little crazy.

Wing :: Jun.13.2010 :: Posts :: No Comments »

This is my first real project (though not the first I ever finished) and it’s Kirby and his three friends using Super Game Boy default colors for each of the animals. I started it in March, did the outline work while on vacation and during weekends and the filling during meetings because what are meetings for besides time to cross stitch or knit or crochet?

Once I took the picture I realized that I really should clean off a little spot under the fish (whose name I forgot because I don’t like him nearly as much as Coo and Rick) and reframe the whole thing… I need to figure out what I’m doing next before my next craft-friendly long meeting in a week and a half. I think I’m probably going to do something Cave Story related…

Wing :: May.28.2010 :: Posts :: No Comments »

The school I work at doesn’t give final exams.

Okay, that was a lie.

When I say we don’t give final exams I mean that we don’t use a final exam as a make-or-break assessment tool. Some of my coworkers and I do give final exams in the literal sense: they are exams and they are at the end of the year/semester, and they catch everything important that the course covered.

Today I was talking to a colleague who teaches history about final exams and he told me about his final “exam”: a short essay that answers a question, written in half an hour. The thing here though is that the students come up with their own question in advance; the only requirement is that the question has to capture the entirety of the course or at least most of it. This means that students think about broad concepts of pivotal moments in what they studied; more importantly the students get to think about and decide what was important in the course. If a student’s topic is about the Romans instead of the Greeks she has to first be able to defend why the Romans were more worthy to be placed on her exam.

We as teachers have ideas on what the most important skills in algebra or geometry or calculus are. It’s not hard (but also not easy) to make a list of things that a student who studies high school algebra should know. In fact a ton of people have done it. Some of those people publish those lists and say “this is the official list of stuff kids in this state should know because they are important”. And then we create summative assessment based on the lists. And we tell the kids that these ideas on the list are important. Some of us try to convince the kids that these ideas are important through motivations and discoveries and projects. But we never really ask the kids, at the end, what the list is. Instead of saying “the final covers this this that and this” when students ask “what would the final cover?”, why not ask them what would be fair on the final? Even if there is in fact a set list (and hence, right answers) it’d be a nice discussion and assessment on whether what the students think are the important topics matches up with what we decide are important.

Here’s the experiment I’m running for the next ten days:

I have three students who have completed all the material in a standard college level calculus course doing an independent project with me for the next week and a half. Their goal is to recall calculus and try to solve harder problems than the problems they have done in class. They have a pile of calculus textbooks and they have to choose what problems to do (and come up with their own problems) given that those problems require using all the skills that they believe are the most essential in calculus, be of reasonable difficulty and be interesting. I have my own ideas of what that list should be but I’m very interested in seeing what they come up with.

Wing :: May.26.2010 :: Posts :: 2 Comments »

I teach both high school freshmen and seniors. Recently I’ve been noticing that the freshmen have active imaginations and like to interpret the simplest problem in unconventional and often complicated but rich ways. The seniors, on the other hand, will face a complex problem and not even try to interpret the problem. Everyday I’m surrounded by 14 year old kids who are eager to explore and argue and be creative and in three years they too will get their creativity and joy beaten out of them. And it’s all my fault.

In fact, Keith Devlin wrote a column about my failure.

Whenever I teach combinations and permutations (say, last Monday) my class inevitably gets into an argument about whether one problem should be solved using combinations or permutations. Although the textbook tries to be clear beyond reasonable doubt whether order matters in every problem there is always one problem that can be open to interpretation—unless you know the keywords and templates that textbooks and standardized tests use, then it’s crystal clear. The kids, especially the younger ones, love to argue about the problem and I’d do them a disservice if I didn’t assign said problem.

But.

Ultimately, I have to say “yes, you’re right in that the problem can be interpreted that way, but if you use that answer on, say, the SATs or in college you’ll be marked wrong” because while they are indeed being reasonable and the discussion that arose from an ambiguous problem is usually a great one part of my job is in fact to make sure that my students won’t be judged as idiots by people whose standards my employer, my students, their parents and myself do not agree with. I am fine with the answer; straight As for the kid who can think for herself and defend her answers reasonably even though she interprets the problem differently than those guys with PhDs on the inside front cover of the textbook. But I also have to tell them that those guys with PhDs represent an establishment that will say they are wrong because I owe it to them and their families to let them know that this is how the world we live in works.

This is the precise moment when they feel the first ACME brand iron weight slowly crushing their spirit. Soon they will become jaded, weary eighteen-year-olds ready to accept other soul-crushing responsibilities of adulthood like bills and children and (lack of) jobs and the cold comfort that, perhaps, if they make enough money, they can buy a motorcycle and feel some glimpse of happiness they once felt in their childhood before their math teacher told them that if they wrote down what they believed in they would be marked wrong by The Establishment.

We want our students to be special and not necessarily conventional. We want them to think for themselves make their own healthy choices even if others may not like those choices. But in math education, wrong means wrong. It’s not a you-are-playing-with-gender-stereotypes-and-we’ll-look-at-you-weirdly-while-judging-you or you-are-playing-in-a-band-even-though-you’re-thirty-you-should-have-a-real-job kind of wrong. It’s a stamp that says you are scientifically proven to be worse than the kid who follows all the steps in the cookbook. Sadly, you’re not going to find a support group for people who don’t interpret word problems as they are “meant” to be interpreted as much as support groups for people who fail to interpret word problems.

My personal goal is that my students would be able to think for themselves but be able to be on their “best behavior” and restraint themselves while applying their best analytical skills when it comes to things like standardized tests and passing that required college stats class (where there are actually right answers to all the questions, unlike statistics in real life) when they need to. And the first step is to let them know that I don’t actually have an answer and it’s up to them to find one on their own and convince me that it’s true. I’ve been doing that a lot in the past years but I’ve slowly slipped over the last year. It’s a good thing that I just watched the Dan Meyer TED talk and he reminded me to be less helpful. I’m part of the problem, but let’s hope that I can be part of the solution as well.

Wing :: May.20.2010 :: Posts :: No Comments »